Excuse me but I couldn't help noticing...

Every time I go to the gym there's a guy there getting absolutely no benefit out of his exercises because, instead of isolating the muscles he wants to work on, he throws his whole body into every action, spreading the force around and thus strengthening nothing. I always want to say, "Hey, guy, you're getting absolutely no benefit out of your exercises because, instead of isolating the muscles you want to work on, you're throwing your whole body into every action, spreading the force around and thus strengthening nothing!"

I don't go to the gym that much so it's entirely possible that this guy is looking at me and thinking, "Hey, guy, etc. etc." but I do feel confident enough in my knowledge of exercise theory to know that I'm doing it better than he is. He gets too little benefit in exchange for too much cost. He's inefficient, and inefficiency is always the enemy.

Of course I say nothing. Am I being polite, or complicit in the fellow's early death from obesity and his family's grief? Or both? Deciding when to speak up and when to stifle is, of course, a major (if not THE major) skill each of us needs to learn in conducting our personal and professional lives. As a journalist I figured it was always my job to speak up, but now that I'm a corporate manager expressing myself carries unprecedented consequences.

The great risk, of course, is failing to cover my tooshy when commenting on a process or product that just may be the pet process or product of someone who participates in deciding whether I get to keep my job. Not a single boss in the world says s/he wants to be surrounded by yes wo/men, but they all do. (We all do, I should say, for I'm a boss now. An extremely middle-ranking boss, to be sure -- the NCO of the corporate world -- but a boss nonetheless.)

On the bright side, I'm enjoying having people in my life who have a tangible interest in taking my opinion seriously. As I told one of my reports, "I'm jealous of you because I've always wanted a boss like me!" After observing worker-manager relations up close in a large variety of settings these past 23 years, and paying decent money for a management degree, I do feel better qualified to manage people than many of the managers who have managed me. Since management's only genuine task is to facilitate production, I'll concentrate on the work, divide tasks according to my understanding of the team members' capabilities, and judge us all by what we produce. If anybody, report or superior, shows me I'm doing something that impedes production, I'll change it.

I probably won't tell the guy at the gym that he's wasting his time and his dues, but I definitely will tell my reports when I see a way for them to improve what they do, and thus improve what we do. Twenty-three years from now, I hope, they'll look back and remember having learned something together.